You know that awkward scenario where you’re floating along through life, minding your own business, when all of a sudden somebody mentions the name of your ex and BAM!

It hits you like a brick. All of a sudden blood rushes to your ears, your cheeks feel warm and you get the sense that everyone’s turned to look at you. It’s a hugely uncomfortable feeling.

Now I was put in this exact same position in the office on Tuesday afternoon because, to all intents and purposes, my ex is Harry Redknapp.

I guess you could describe Harry as the most significant ‘relationship’ of my 25 years of traipsing up and down to White Hart Lane.

There were highs and lows, there always are. We had our disagreements, like when he told me fifth ‘is as good as it gets’ and that time, oh how we laughed, when he went on TV and said he wanted Chelsea to win the Champions League, as they were English, even though it would render our top-four finish pointless as we’d be in the Europa League anyway.

However, he was also ‘at my side’ on some of the greatest days of my football-watching life: a dominant 3-1 win over European Champions Inter Milan, 2-1 wins over Arsenal and Chelsea in the space of five days, and a trip to the Bernabeu to watch those famous white shirts... play against Real Madrid in the quarter-finals of the Champions League.

Good times. However, let’s be clear. Harry was never a very good football manager. He’s very good at signing players, but not very good at signing very good players. Tactics and subs are something of a struggle too. What he always has been, is a people person. A talker. A motivator of men. I have no doubt he’d have made a fine England manager, as he wouldn’t have had to do much, except pep up a supremely talented group, get them to run through walls for St George and we’d have made World Cup semis regularly. I truly believe it.

He has generally also been something even more important – lucky. He seems to have ‘lucked’ into clubs with massive chequebooks wherever he has been, and he certainly ‘lucked’ into the best squad Tottenham have ever had.

Don’t think me a jilted ex, stung by Harry’s determination to ditch us, me, for the England job in 2012. No I’ll always be grateful for the good times, I will never forget them, I’m not about to start cutting his head out of holiday snaps from the likes of Madrid and Milan.

However, I was never blinded by the charisma and personally always believed what Tottenham achieved under Harry was often in spite of him, not because of him. Remember that Gareth Bale chap? The Welsh bloke that Harry was shopping to Nottingham Forest in January 2010 for £1.5m, the one he insisted just three years ago would return to be a left-back. Luka Modric, that other Real Madrid player, centre midfielder, you know him too, right, the one Harry used on the left wing!

Now fans of yet another club will have begun to see beneath the façade – big money signings, underachievement on the pitch, detachment from any kind of blame, things that even the best one-liners out of a car window struggle to make up for. I reckon there will be another manager along within days who gets a better tune out of QPR this year and keeps them up.

I wish Harry the best with his recovery from knee surgery, which was absolutely, definitely the reason for his resignation, and also his career in the media.

There’s a place for his jokes in the TV studio, but no longer one for them in the Premier League.